


Another Kind of Desert

by MartinusMiraculorum



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Awkward Family Gatherings, Luke Skywalker is and will always be my Problematic Fave, Post-Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 05:04:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5526452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MartinusMiraculorum/pseuds/MartinusMiraculorum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(In every life, there are moments)</p><p>When she arrives, he is waiting for her. Neither of them knows just how long.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another Kind of Desert

In every life, there are moments. Moments that span an instant and an eternity all at once. You rarely see them coming, or alternatively, you see them coming from a long, _long_ ways away. It really depends on the person. On the moment, truth be told.

 

Rey isn’t entirely sure where she first heard that sentiment. Her early years on Jakku are a blur of hardship and hunger, leading up to the day when she first ventured into the Imperial Star Destroyer that lay dead and shattered like the bones of some great beast. When she let go of her fear and climbed, finding a miraculously intact computer switchboard with crystal power circuits jarred out of place, hanging from a fraying wire. Had she not found it, it might have fallen the next day, the next hour, been broken beyond repair, just another worthless pile of debris.

 

Instead, it was the first time she was able to go to bed knowing she had enough food to last the week.

 

A face swims before her vision, a woman, skin tough as leather, her voice deep and weighed down with her years. Yes. Yes, that was when she had heard it. She was talking about the first time she had met the man she would marry.

 

But this was Jakku, there were no happy endings: he was dead in the sands from a blaster malfunction two years later, and his widow eking out a living amidst the broken remnants of a war that somehow seemed so far away, though she had surely lived it (but _not_ on Jakku. One battle. One battle that had shattered the peace of this desolate place. Before that, Jakku had been nothing. And after that, there were only the ghosts) She had helped Rey; been invaluable, really, in teaching her how to survive as she grew taller and stronger and the others in the forsaken hole that was Niima Outpost started to perceive this scrawny, remarkably intuitive and lucky little girl as a threat.

 

One day, she hadn’t been there anymore. Rey never actually found out what happened. She tried not to think about it.

 

She isn’t on Jakku now. She doesn’t know what this world is called, but the sea stretches to the horizon in every direction, winds wafting the unfamiliar scent of salt and blue water. The ground underfoot is not shifting sands but moss clinging to damp rocks. It is treacherous in its own way, she knows. She can't lose her footing. Not now.

 

She’s dropped her staff, and almost without realizing it, the lightsaber is in her hand, and she’s reaching out to this figure who seems to have stepped out of a story. Except, it’s not like that at all. Because something about him is deeply, _unsettlingly_ familiar.

 

She feels things she has never felt before, save for one moment, when she first clutched the artifact she now holds. It frightens her. It’s dangerous, and with it, _she_ is dangerous. She still isn’t sure what she might have done to Ren had the world not literally torn them apart.

 

Luke Skywalker stares back at her, his expression equal parts astonishment and sorrow, though somewhere in those blue eyes she can just see the slightest flicker of hope.

 

He glances slowly down at the lightsaber in her hand, and then shakes his head slowly. “That doesn’t belong to me anymore.”

 

Rey’s mouth has gone dry. She swallows and manages, “but it did?”

 

“It did,” Luke replies, and Rey knows there is a story there. A painful one, reading Luke’s body language (she was always good at that. when you interacted with so many species, telling friend from foe without the use of the spoken word was vital to survival)

 

“So why don’t you want it back?” she challenges, not giving in, holding the lightsaber steady even though she feels its weight – not just the metal and plasteel, but another weight.

 

The weight of lives, lived _and_ taken.

 

And then Luke smiles, to her intense surprise. “I never thought I would see it again, truly. It’s yours now. It chose you, and you feel that, don’t you?”

 

Rey lowers the hilt, crossing her arms defensively. “I really don’t know what I feel right now.”

 

Luke shakes his head, and she thinks she catches another smile. It annoys her to no end. “That’s alright. Most people really don’t. And when they think they do, they are often due for a surprise.”

 

Rey stares back at him. She’s not sure what exactly she was expecting, but this… “You’re Luke Skywalker,” she says, daring him to deny it.

 

“Once, maybe,” he says softly. He looks at her then, and through her. She feels her soul bared to those eyes, and she shivers.

 

“Rey,” he says simply. And there’s something else in his voice now. Sorrow, regret…guilt?

 

And in that instant she _knows_. Knows what the Force has been trying to tell her since she first touched that damned lightsaber. Knows why Luke seems so familiar. And in that instant, she is _angry_.

 

“You _left_ me there,” she bites out.

 

Luke seems to stagger then, as if she had struck him. A part of her regrets it, while another revels in it. How _right_ it feels. She had waited so long for her family to come back. And now she finds her…her father, out here, lost for ten years, as if he knew this day would come.

 

“ _Why_?” she demands. Tears hoarsen her voice, and she gets angry with that too. Now is not the time for weakness. Rey cries, more than she’d like to admit. But she tries to do it on her own, when no one else is watching her. Crying shows weakness, she’d been told, and weakness on Jakku could be lethal.

 

Perhaps that explains why she likes Finn so much, she muses. He shows emotion, a lot of it, and he is strong.

 

Her first friend.

 

She could have done a lot worse.

 

Once she had fought that emotion, that compassion, that empathy, tried to become as hard and uncaring as Plutt and all the others, as the world of Jakku itself. She was never very good at it. There had been another girl, a Rodian, maybe five years older than her, and infinitely more naïve. Rey had never figured out why she had ended up there; she wasn’t a slave, and she had no talent with machines or instincts for salvage. They had not been friends, not exactly. But on more than one occasion, she had shared a canteen or a fragment of food with the hapless girl (girl, she thought, for even though she was older she was more a child than Rey could ever remember being). One day, she too had vanished. Scuttlebutt around the settlement said that another Rodian had come, a female, and taken her away. She hoped…Force, what was her name? was happier, now. It was best not to dwell on it.

 

She realizes Luke…her _father_ , damn it, has not answered her.

 

“Well?” she demands.

 

Luke continues to stare, but there’s something different about it. “There it is,” he mumbles.

 

“There what is?” she says, her voice softer now, and she doesn’t know why.

 

“Your mother,” he says simply. Then, “I can’t…’I’m sorry’ isn’t enough, I know,” he swallows. “But can it be a start?”

 

She looks back at him. She should feel betrayed and hurt and angry and she is all of those things, but she can’t ignore the fact that her father is standing right there. Her father is Luke Skywalker, the last of the Jedi, a myth from her childhood. He’s real. And she’s his damn _daughter_.

 

The universe did have a sense of humor.

 

Now she is the one speechless, because what do you say to something like _that_?

 

Luke senses her unease, and puts up a hand. “No, you don’t need to answer that,” he says. “Not yet. I have no right to ask anything of you.” He pauses. “Are you hungry?”

 

Rey wants to ask more questions, but all she can say is “Yes.” Silently, she hooks the lightsaber – her lightsaber now, it seems, to her utility belt, and picks up the comforting weight of her staff.

 

She hears the strange sound of waves crashing hard against the rocks below them. Around her is in an entirely different kind of desert, she knows. But in its own way, no less forgiving.

 

She follows.

**Author's Note:**

> Despite my misgivings about TFA, it basically did everything I wanted to, and more. So I couldn't resist writing this fic about my newfound space daughter, whose journey was nothing short of breathtaking
> 
> Who is totally a Skywalker. I will fight you. And Abrams, and Kathleen Kennedy, and Larry Kasden, and...anyone.
> 
> (Star Wars, at it's heart, is about two things: catastrophic family drama, and how that family both rips apart the galaxy - with the help of a friendly Sith Lord - and then tries to put it back together again)
> 
> If I continue this, I will blatantly ignore another Star Wars tradition: the dead mother. We've had enough of those, to be frank. And not all mothers have to be nuturing martyrs.


End file.
